Pirate Bay taken offline by its ISP

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Hope you got all those episodes of Lost downloaded in time - the Pirate Bay has been taken offline by its ISP - Black Internet. The ISP was ordered by a court to take the site down or face a penalty of 500,000 Swedish kronor - about £43,000.

Stockholm's district court issued the ruling following an earlier defeat in court for the founders of the site. The ISP - Black Internet - said that it had no choice but to uphold the law, and took the site offline. At the time of writing, it's inaccessible.

It's unlikely that Black Internet is the only provider that supplies bandwidth to the site, so it could be back shortly. However, given the impending sale of the site to Global Gaming Factory X - due to be confirmed within the next week - it's possible that the site's operators won't bother fighting to get it back online and will instead just wait it out and let the new owners deal with the issue.

Former spokesperson for the site Peter Sunde has been tweeting: "A Swedish court apparently decided it is illegal to be an ISP", following that up with "it's a scandal as usual of course".

Rick Falkvinge, leader of Sweden's Pirate Party, said: "This is absolutely ridiculous. The Court seems to consider themselves above the Constitution. This clarifies how copyright law has become untenable, and how information is lacking political skills in the judiciary".

UPDATE: The site may be going back up, though it's still not working for us. Peter Sunde just tweeted "Oh. I'm downloading via the pirate bay now. Three hours later, and it's working again". That didn't take long.